The House of the Seven Gables

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrated by: Donna Barkman

As a milestone of American literature, Hawthorne's second novel stands as sturdily today as when the title mansion was first constructed. This is a finely crafted blend of Gothic horror, mystery, and good old-fashioned ghost story.

An old mansion in Salem, moss-covered and gabled, broods over the destiny of a distinguished but troubled New England Family, the Pynchons. A haunting, centuries-old curse, a forceful probing of national and personal guilt, a romance between the young heroine and an attractive stranger all intertwine in this classic work by one of America's greatest novelists.

Public Domain (P)1983 Jimcin Recordings

Critic reviews

"[A] great romance, concerned with the decadence of Puritanism." (The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature)

Read at last

I've tried several times on my quest to read the "great books" to read The House of the Seven Gables but never made it through the first chapter. I found it a bit of a struggle to get through the first chapter of this audio version but, once I did that, the book "took off" and I throughly enjoyed it. The narrator did a very good job of a book that must not have been easy to record.

Good story - horrible narration

Hello,

I am going to look for this audio book with a different narrator. Her voice kept putting me to sleep. There was no infliction and was extremely monotone.

Well done

I tired reading this but stopped because of the rather difficult syntax. However, the audio version made it much easier to understand since the reader did all the work. I thought she did a very good job.

Excellent Exexcution

Great telling of this classic gothic tale. The story has moments that drag or seem to stray, but this is really Hawthorne's style, I find. Very well narrated version here.

Great for poor sleepers

I love 19thC novels and this was one of the few I hadn't read yet so I looked forward to listening to it.

Unfortunately, I thought the boredom would kill me. The good thing is that the droning voice of the narrator worked a treat to put me to sleep night after night. After a couple of nights I had no idea what was going on but I got bored of skipping back to where I had [mentally] left off and just let it run through. I love most of the audio books I've bought but not this.

What is most tedious is that nothing, I mean nothing, happens in this long novel! There's a sort of revelation towards the end but by the time you get there you couldn't care less anyway.

Buy G. Eliot's Middlemarch instead. It's a real treat. Or anything narrated by Nadia May.